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New Trail Maker

After a little nudge of a gentle reminder in response to my blundering, muddy boots and all, straight in to a thread in the Software Discussion forum, I thought it prudent to post up a more formal "Hello!" in the more appropriate place for first posts .

I'm in my forties and the most common cause of me creating or reading a map (other than real world travel) is, as with many, RPG's.

Having had the hand-drawn fruits of a fifteen year campaign be lost has prompted me into the ways of the software mapping program so that I will have both 'hard' and 'electronic' versions of my future creations. It's a daunting task and there is no way that I shall be able to rebuild my old 'world' (the thousands of invented place names alone would prevent that) but I'm hoping that a fire will be kindled by a quest for new creations.

I shall no doubt be pestering everyone daft shortly with idiot questions of the "How do I ... ?" ilk .

What happened to my old world maps was that I gave them to an artist friend of mine to redraw - the gulf between my drawing talents and his was vast . He spent quite a while on this task (i.e. years) whilst my campaign was dormant due to too much in the way of workload. He was just about done when, as best as I can fathom, during a sudden and fractious domestic split, the drawings (both beautiful 'new' and scraggity 'old') disappeared :eek: and .

At the moment, I can't decide whether to go ahead and re-draught the general world shape, apply the politcal and geographical regions (shoe-horning in the details I can remember) and accept that it's 'not the same as it was'.

Or do I do a cleansweep, starting from scratch with a new world, new gaming system, new NPC's, new history ... ?

Laying it out like that, I think the 're-imagining' option is certainly a vastly preferable task. Re-populating the NPC's and writing new histories for new countries would take me ... well ... erm ... about fifteen years .

Take for example, Profantasy's Wonderful program: Fractal Terrains. With it you can create a world in the click of a button.

Now the two worlds below took me less than 1 minute make each, and already I can see ideas for them (espcially moreso because 4th Edition D&D is coming).

Could I shoe horn parts of my current campaign world onto it? Sure. EVen if I lost every document of my old worlds, I have a lot of it in my head. Would I lose place names, NPCs etc? Yep, but to me that is not important. I like to build and so I would start building, naming, etc.

EDIT: Slaps self on forehead for not realising before hitting Post that here, of all places, people would already know that .

Don't be so sure! I have no experience with either program, so hearing what they can do (even what might be considered the most obvious or basic task) is good to let me assess if I might want to use them.

Like a zombie re-animating after a long time spent dormant, I awaken once more to the project of re-mapping my campaign world .

I confess that I pressed on with Fractal Mapper for a while and made some progress, though it was very hard work due to my trying to get the programme to do what it was not really designed to do (and my not knowing how to go about it ). But work pressure squeezed the life out of the project. Plus other friends took up the mantle of running games and that reduced the impetous off me to get mine up and running once more .

Now it is time to try again {even tho I am surpised that there is no new version of Fractal Mapper by now} ...